thatdemoguy

I am fully aware of the date that I am publishing this, and I assure you that this is NOT an April Fool's Day joke.  I have just been in a state of deep thought and looking at the way the gaming landscape has been changing around me. I have no issue admitting that in the years since the only REAL console war between Sega and Nintendo, that I have been a firm supporter of Sony and the PlayStation platform. After the Super Nintendo (the greatest system ever btw) went out to pasture, it was the PlayStation 1 and then its bigger, badder, and blacker revisions that have kept me firmly enthralled and immersed into this hobby or rather way of life we call gaming. This doesn't mean that I haven't bought the hardware/software of the competition, the strongest of which being Microsoft and their XBOX brand, it just means that when given a choice, I prefer to play multi-platform games on my Sony system, if it is the version that performs the best.

 

Each company has indeed had more than their fair share of missteps, like the great PSN outage a few years back. But I cant think of a more damning and outright damaging situation to have affected one of them publicly than the XBOXOne announcement of 2013, or rather when they failed so hard that they almost killed their own new system BEFORE it released. If you don't remember this was when Microsoft made a bold move stating that the XBOXOne was going to pioneer digital distribution, and be the all in one media box center for your home, full of useless DRM and forced always online check ins that could lock your system and all that jazz. This enraged the stalwart console faithful like myself, who felt that they were killing the reason that we actually own our consoles and taking away our rights as consumers, we like to OWN the games we purchase. We felt that going to a world where we would only be buying the rights to a digital code was an absolutely ludicrous outlook. I still wholeheartedly agree that I prefer to have a physical copy of something that I buy, especially a game, but I have to admit that now, nearly 3 years later.... maybe Microsoft was right.

 

What’s brought on this epiphany?

 

Well its no secret that I have been absolutely hooked on playing The Division in recent weeks. Despite some critic's opinions, and the relatively simplistic gameplay loop, I really like it. I even gave my thoughts on it HERE. But even in that very piece I stated that The Division was the very definition of "games as a service". Basically with the game's primary mode of play being the online functions and building a constant and persistent world for players to commune in, that what we all bought when we bought that game was the right to access this game world, the online hub. And with the game requiring a constant connection, if the servers ever go down, or when that day comes when Ubisoft decides that its time to move on, and this will happen sooner rather than later, then actually owning the game is very pointless. The physical copy that I put my money into has absolutely zero value because the game will then be unplayable, regardless of if you own the physical or digital version. But if you own the physical, at that point it’s just a coaster. It can’t be sold, it can’t be traded, and it may as well just be trash to be thrown away. So to preserve precious shelf space, wouldn't it have been easier to just have downloaded the digital version and then once support ended, simply delete the game? I like my tangible collection, but I like convenience more.

 

Speaking of convenience, long gone are the days of being able to walk in the store, purchase a game, then either take it straight home or even over to a friend's house and start playing instantly. That convenience is no longer afforded to us. Virtually every game nowadays has a fairly hefty install that has to be completed before you can even hope to get into actually playing the game. Next week's big release, Quantum Break, which I will not confirm OR deny that I have already played *wink* not only has a 40GB install for just the game, but if you want the full seamless experience, there is an optional extra 80GB install for all of the live action content so it wont be forced to stream from the server when you make each of the various branching choices. That extra install is another layer of convenience, but it also further emphasizes the fact that digital distribution is becoming more the norm and less the exception. To ease the frustration of forced installs, almost every title now offers the ability to pre-load the game if it is purchased or pre-ordered digitally, so therefore on the date of the game's release, your system has already downloaded the required files and updates to get you playing instantly instead of going into a store, buying the game, taking it home, opening it, then putting it in the system and waiting for all the day 1 update files to install.

 

Lastly, and this is a bit more of a personal thing, but there is no magic in owning physical media these days. Everything is mass-produced, so there are no true "rare" titles anymore. And the large majority of games no longer even come with a manual anymore. We went from full color booklets that not only gave you the instructions on how to play the game, but were the primer to the game world you were about to get into. These then became simple black and white tri-fold pamphlets that had the basic controls on them. To now we just get a disk and some very samey and generic cover art. If you want a book nowadays you can pay another $35 for the strategy guide that comes with all the artwork and character information that used to be packed in with the game. From a collector's standpoint it’s almost insulting to have to accept that companies nowadays see the lore attached to the game as something they can now monetize so shamelessly.

 

In retrospect, I look back at Microsoft's E3 2013 announcement, and even though they totally botched the delivery of their message, especially when they intended to take away consumer's rights, they were actually pretty spot on with the direction this gaming generation would be going. Does this mean that we should all just accept this movement and embrace our digital overlords? NOPE. But it does mean that we all need to prepare for the eventual shift towards full digital distribution in the very near future.

 

So how do you feel about the digital revolution? Are you ready to embrace our eventual and inevitable future, or do you, like myself, wish that we could go back to a time when owning and collecting actually meant something? Feel free to sound off in the comments here or hit me with a tweet at thatdemoguy.